by Don DeLillo
She spoke quietly.
“They had to know. They made a situation that had to come to this, with children. They absolutely had to know. They went there to die. They made a situation, with children, specifically, and they knew how it would end. They had to know.”
There was silence at either end. After a time she said it was warm, in the eighties, and added that the kid was fine, the kid was all right. There was an edge in her voice, followed by another silence. He tried to listen into this, find the link in her remarks. In the deep pause he began to see himself standing exactly where he was, in a room somewhere, in a hotel somewhere, with a telephone in his hand.
She told him that the findings were unremarkable. There was no sign of impairment. She kept using the word unremarkable. She loved the word. The word expressed enormous relief. There were no lesions, hemorrhages or infarcts. She read the results to him and he stood in his room and listened. There was so much to report that was unremarkable. She loved the word infarct. Then she said she wasn’t sure she believed the findings. Okay for now but what about later? He’d told her many times and told her again that she was devising ways to be afraid. This wasn’t fear, she said, but only skepticism. She was doing well. She had normal morphology, she said, quoting the report. She loved this term but couldn’t quite believe it referred to her. It was a question of skepticism, she said, from the Greek for skeptic. Then she talked about her father. She was slightly drunk, not half smashed but maybe a quarter, which was about as smashed as she ever got. She talked about her father and asked about his. Then she laughed and said, “Listen,” and she began to recite a series of numbers, pausing a beat between each, using a happy sort of singsong.
One hundred, ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine.
He missed the kid. Neither liked talking on the phone. How do you talk to a kid on the phone? He talked to her. They talked sometimes in the middle of the night, her time, or middle of the night, his time. She described her position in bed, curled up, hand between her legs, or body spread wide above the sheets, phone on the pillow, and he heard her murmuring in the double distance, hand to breast, hand to pussy, seeing her so clearly he thought his head might explode.
12
There was a show of Morandi paintings at a gallery in Chelsea, still lifes, six of them, and a couple of drawings, still lifes, and of course she went. She had mixed feelings about going but went. Because even this, bottles and jars, a vase, a glass, simple shapes in oil on canvas, pencil on paper, brought her back into the midst of it, the thrust of arguments, perceptions, deadly politics, her mother and her mother’s lover.
Nina had insisted on returning the two paintings on her living room wall. They went back to Martin in the early stages of their estrangement, and the old passport photos as well. This was work done half a century earlier, the paintings, and the photographs were much older, most of them, and it was work that both women loved. But she honored her mother’s wishes, arranged the shipment, thought of the dollar value of the paintings, respected her mother’s integrity, thought of the paintings themselves, Berlin-bound, to be bargained over and sold in a cell-phone transaction. The room was tomblike without them.
The gallery was in an old industrial building with a cage elevator that required a living human, full-time, to crank the lever on a rotary control, bouncing visitors up and down the shaft.
She went down a long dim corridor and found the gallery. There was no one there. She stood at the first canvas, looking. The show was small, the paintings were small. She stepped back, moved close. She liked this, alone in a room, looking.
She looked at the third painting for a long time. It was a variation on one of the paintings her mother had owned. She noted the nature and shape of each object, the placement of objects, the tall dark oblongs, the white bottle. She could not stop looking. There was something hidden in the painting. Nina’s living room was there, memory and motion. The objects in the painting faded into the figures behind them, the woman smoking in the chair, the standing man. In time she moved on to the next painting and the next, fixing each in her mind, and then there were the drawings. She hadn’t approached the drawings yet.
A man came in. He was interested in looking at her before he looked at the paintings. Maybe he expected certain freedoms to be in effect because they were like-minded people in a rundown building, here to look at art.
She moved through the open doorway into the office area, where the drawings hung. At the desk a young man leaned over a laptop. She examined the drawings. She wasn’t sure why she was looking so intently. She was passing beyond pleasure into some kind of assimilation. She was trying to absorb what she saw, take it home, wrap it around her, sleep in it. There was so much to see. Turn it into living tissue, who you are.
She went back to the main room but could not look at the work the same way with the man there, watching her or not. He wasn’t watching her but he was there, fifty and leathery, a mug-shot monochrome, probably a painter, and she went out of the room and down the corridor, where she hit the elevator button.
She realized she hadn’t picked up a catalog but didn’t go back. She didn’t need a catalog. The elevator came rattling up the shaft. Nothing detached in this work, nothing free of personal resonance. All the paintings and drawings carried the same title. Natura Morta. Even this, the term for still life, yielded her mother’s last days.
There were times, in the sports book, when he glanced at one of the screens and wasn’t sure whether he was seeing a fragment of live action or of slow-motion replay. It was a lapse that should have unsettled him, an issue of basic brain function, one reality versus another, but it all seemed a matter of false distinctions, fast, slow, now, then, and he drank his beer and listened to the mingled sounds.
He never bet on these events. It was the effect on the senses that drew him here. Everything happened remotely, even the nearest noise. The high room was dimly lit, men seated heads up, or standing, or walking through, and out of the stealthy tension in the air come the shouts, a horse breaking out of the pack, a runner rounding second, and the action moves to the foreground, there to here, life or death. He liked listening to the visceral burst, men on their feet, calling out, a rough salvo of voices that brought heat and open emotion to the soft pall of the room. Then it was over, gone in seconds, and he liked that too.
He showed his money in the poker room. The cards fell randomly, no assignable cause, but he remained the agent of free choice. Luck, chance, no one knew what these things were. These things were only assumed to affect events. He had memory, judgment, the ability to decide what is true, what is alleged, when to strike, when to fade. He had a measure of calm, of calculated isolation, and there was a certain logic he might draw on. Terry Cheng said that the only true logic in the game was the logic of personality. But the game had structure, guiding principles, sweet and easy interludes of dream logic when the player knows that the card he needs is the card that’s sure to fall. Then, always, in the crucial instant ever repeated hand after hand, the choice of yes or no. Call or raise, call or fold, the little binary pulse located behind the eyes, the choice that reminds you who you are. It belonged to him, this yes or no, not to a horse running in the mud somewhere in New Jersey.
She lived in the spirit of what is ever impending.
They embraced, saying nothing. Later they spoke in low tones that carried a nuance of tact. They would share nearly four full days of indirection before they talked about things that mattered. It was lost time, designed from the first hour to go unremembered. She would remember the song. They spent nights in bed with the windows open, traffic noises, voices carrying, five or six girls marching down the street at two a.m. singing an old rock ballad that she sang along with them, softly, lovingly, word for word, matching accents, pauses and breaks, hating to hear the voices fade. Words, their own, were not much more than sounds, airstreams of shapeless breath, bodies speaking. There was a breeze if they were lucky but even in the damp heat on the top floor under
a tar roof she kept the air conditioner off. He needed to feel real air, she said, in a real room, with thunder rumbling just above.
On these nights it seemed to her that they were falling out of the world. This was not a form of erotic illusion. She was continuing to withdraw, but calmly, in control. He was self-sequestered, as always, but with a spatial measure now, one of air miles and cities, a dimension of literal distance between himself and others.
They took the kid to a couple of museums and then she watched them toss a baseball in the park. Justin threw hard. He wasted no time. He snatched the ball out of the air, took it in his bare hand, smacked it back into the glove, reared back and threw hard and then, next toss, maybe a little harder. He was like a pitching machine with hair and teeth, register set to peak velocity. Keith was amused, then impressed, then puzzled. He told the kid to calm down, ease up. He told him to follow through. There was the windup, the release, the follow-through. He told him he was burning a hole in his old man’s hand.
She came across a poker tournament on TV. He was in the next room scanning a landfill of accumulated mail. She saw three or four tables, in long shot, with spectators seated among them, clustered in pockets, in spooky blue light. The tables were slightly elevated, players immersed in a fluorescent glow and bent in mortal tension. She didn’t know where this was taking place, or when, and she didn’t know why the usual method was not in effect, close-ups of thumbs, knuckles, cards and faces. But she watched. She hit the mute button and looked at the players seated around the tables as the camera slowly swept the room and she realized that she was waiting to see Keith. The spectators sat in that icy violet light, able to see little or nothing. She wanted to see her husband. The camera caught the faces of players previously obscured and she looked closely, one by one. She imagined herself in cartoon format, a total fool, hurrying to Justin’s room, hair flying, and dragging him out of bed and standing him up in front of the screen so he could see his father, Look, in Rio or London or Las Vegas. His father was twenty feet away at the desk in the next room reading bank statements and writing checks. She watched a while longer, looking for him, and then she stopped.
They talked on day four, sitting in the living room, late, with a horsefly fixed to the ceiling.
“There are things I understand.”
“All right.”
“I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let’s not say men. Let’s say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.”
“You understand this.”
“They protect themselves this way, themselves and others. I understand this. But then there’s the other thing and that’s the family. This is the point I want to make, that we need to stay together, keep the family going. Just us, three of us, long-term, under the same roof, not every day of the year or every month but with the idea that we’re permanent. Times like these, the family is necessary. Don’t you think? Be together, stay together? This is how we live through the things that scare us half to death.”
“All right.”
“We need each other. Just people sharing the air, that’s all.”
“All right,” he said.
“But I know what’s happening. You’re going to drift away. I’m prepared for that. You’ll stay away longer, drift off somewhere. I know what you want. It’s not exactly a wish to disappear. It’s the thing that leads to that. Disappearing is the consequence. Or maybe it’s the punishment.”
“You know what I want. I don’t know. You know.”
“You want to kill somebody,” she said.
She didn’t look at him when she said this.
“You’ve wanted this for some time,” she said. “I don’t know how it works or how it feels. But it’s a thing you carry with you.”
Now that she’d said it, she wasn’t sure she believed it. But she was certain he’d never argued the idea in his mind. It was in his skin, maybe just a pulse at the side of the forehead, the faintest cadence in a small blue vein. She knew there was something that had to be satisfied, a matter discharged in full, and she thought this was at the heart of his restlessness.
“Too bad I can’t join the army. Too old,” he said, “or I could kill without penalty and then come home and be a family.”
He was drinking scotch, sipping it, neat, and smiling faintly at what he’d said.
“You can’t go back to the job you had. I understand that.”
“The job. The job wasn’t much different from the job I had before all this happened. But that was before, this is after.”
“I know that most lives make no sense. I mean in this country, what makes sense? I can’t sit here and say let’s go away for a month. I’m not going to reduce myself to saying something like that. Because that’s another world, the one that makes sense. But listen to me. You were stronger than I was. You helped me get here. I don’t know what would have happened.”
“I can’t talk about strength. What strength?”
“That’s what I saw and felt. You were the one in the tower but I was the berserk. Now, damn it, I don’t know.”
After a silence he said, “I don’t know either,” and they laughed.
“I used to watch you sleep. I know how strange that sounds. But it wasn’t strange. Just by being who you were, being alive and back here with us. I watched you. I felt I knew you in a way I’d never known you before. We were a family. That’s what it was. That’s how we did it.”
“Look, trust me.”
“All right.”
“I’m not set on doing anything permanent,” he said. “I go away a while, come back. I’m not about to disappear. Not about to do anything drastic. I’m here now and I’ll be back. You want me back. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Go away, come back. Simple as that.”
“There’s money coming,” she said. “The sale is almost complete.”
“Money coming.”
“Yes,” she said.
He’d helped work out details of the transaction concerning her mother’s apartment. He’d read contracts, made adjustments and e-mailed instructions from a casino on some Indian reservation where a tournament was in progress.
“Money coming,” he said again. “The kid’s education. Now through college, eleven or twelve years, criminal sums of money. But that’s not what you’re saying. You’re saying we can afford a major loss I might suffer in the card rooms. This won’t happen.”
“If you believe it, I believe it.”
“Hasn’t happened and it won’t,” he said.
“What about Paris? Will that happen?”
“It became Atlantic City. A month from now.”
“How does the warden feel about conjugal visits?”
“You don’t want to be there.”
“I don’t. You’re right,” she said. “Because thinking about it is one thing. Seeing it would put me in depression. People sitting around a table going shuffle shuffle. Week after week. I mean catching planes to go play cards. I mean aside from the absurdity, the total psychotic folly, isn’t there something very sad about this?”
“You said it yourself. Most lives make no sense.”
“But isn’t it demoralizing? Doesn’t it wear you down? It must eat away your spirit. I mean I was watching on TV last night. Like a séance in hell. Tick tock tick tock. What happens after months of this? Or years. Who do you become?”
He looked at her and nodded as if he agreed and then kept nodding, taking the gesture to another level, a kind of deep sleep, a narcolepsy, eyes open, mind shut down.
There was one final thing, too self-evident to need saying. She wanted to be safe in the world and he did not.
13
When she received a summons for jury service some months earlier and reported to the United States District Court with five hundred other potential jurors and learned that the trial for which they’d been assembled concerned a lawyer accused of aiding the cause of terrorism, she filled out the forty-five-page questionna
ire with truths, half-truths and heartfelt lies.
For some time before that day she’d been offered books to edit on terrorism and related subjects. Every subject seemed related. She wasn’t sure why she’d been so desperate to work on such books during the weeks and months when she could not sleep and there were songs of desert mystics in the hallway.
The trial was now in progress but she didn’t follow it in the newspaper. She’d been Juror Number 121, excused from serving on the basis of her written responses. She didn’t know whether it was the true answers or the lies that had made this happen.
She knew that the lawyer, an American woman, was associated with a radical Muslim cleric who was serving a life sentence for terrorist activity. She knew that the man was blind. This was common knowledge. He was the Blind Sheik. But she didn’t know the details of the charges made against the lawyer because she wasn’t reading the stories in the newspaper.
She was editing a book on early polar exploration and another on late Renaissance art and she was counting down from one hundred by sevens.
Died by his own hand.
For nineteen years, since he fired the shot that killed him, she’d said these words to herself periodically, in memoriam, beautiful words that had an archaic grain, Middle English, Old Norse. She imagined the words engraved on an old slant tombstone in a neglected churchyard somewhere in New England.
The grandparents hold sacred office. They’re the ones with the deepest memories. But the grandparents are nearly all gone. Justin has only one now, his father’s father, disinclined to travel, a man whose memories have settled into the tight circuit of his days, beyond easy radius of the child. The child is yet to grow into the deep shadow of his own memories. She herself, mother-daughter, is somewhere midway in the series, knowing that one memory at least is inescapably secure, the day that has marked her awareness of who she is and how she lives.